AI Guest Communication in Short-Term Rentals: Building a Human Brand at Scale with Sabrina Mulligan

Summary and Highlights

👤 Meet Sabrina Mulligan

Sabrina Mulligan is an AI-First Hospitality Brand Strategist at Zzzing, a tech-driven hospitality brand in Malta managing a diverse portfolio of hotels, vacation rentals, and boutique guesthouses. Over the past three years, she has scaled the portfolio from 50 to 550+ keys while keeping the brand deeply guest-centric.

Before hospitality, Sabrina spent a decade in media and another decade partnering with global tech brands through the ICE Campus in the Mediterranean. That combination gave her a rare lens — what can technology do for hospitality without losing its soul?

She’s also an award-winning children’s book author, and if you listen closely, you’ll hear that creative instinct woven into everything from how she writes AI policies to how she thinks about the feelings a guest experiences from the moment they book.

Connect with Sabrina on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sabrinamulligan

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🤖 Zoe: Building an AI That Sounds Like Your Brand

When Sabrina started Zzzing’s AI journey about 11 months before this recording, the first challenge wasn’t technical. It was cultural.

Her team worried that AI would make the brand feel cold. That it would hallucinate. That guests would notice. So before a single policy was written, Sabrina did something unusual — she introduced the team to Zoe as a character.

She ran exercises with the team: What does Zoe look like? What are her three favorite actresses? What personality traits does she have? How does she handle empathy? Local expertise? Friendliness?

The result wasn’t just a persona. It was alignment — a shared understanding of who Zoe is and what she stands for. And that internal clarity made everything that followed easier. The team became collaborators in Zoe’s development rather than skeptics watching from the sidelines.

Today, Zoe handles roughly 80–85% of all guest communication — and owner communication too, which Sabrina describes as an even quicker win. Want to know how she structured that and what policies made the difference? That’s exactly what Sabrina unpacks in the episode.

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🏠 Why Owner Communication Was the Faster Win

Most operators think about AI for guests first. Sabrina went there too — but she quickly discovered that AI for owner communication was arguably the faster, cleaner win.

Owners on property management agreements tend to ask the same questions repeatedly: What was that maintenance invoice for? Who booked my property this week? Are you on track to hit the monthly target?

Because Zzzing uses an AI-powered PMS that aggregates data across sources, Zoe can pull the exact service call, tie it to the specific reservation, and give the owner a full, confident answer — instantly. That’s the gap Sabrina draws between a chatbot and true AI: the ability to reason across connected data, not just retrieve pre-written responses.

This is the kind of consistency that building and managing a growing team of humans simply can’t match at scale — and it frees the human team to focus on moments that actually need a person.

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💬 The Art of Writing AI Policies That Feel Human

Here’s where Sabrina’s media and storytelling background becomes a genuine competitive advantage.

Early in the process, her team wrote policies the way most people would: factual, direct, functional. Checkout is at 10 am. Here are the pool hours. These are the rules.

That produced exactly what you’d expect — answers that felt like a policy manual.

The shift happened when Sabrina started writing policies the way a thoughtful host would speak. With a trigger. With feeling. With acknowledgment of what the guest might be experiencing at that moment.

Instead of “checkout is at 10 am,” the policy became: “We hope you loved your stay in Malta. Checkout is at 10. Want us to check if we can extend?”

That’s not just a warmer tone. That’s emotional intelligence baked into the system — and when applied consistently across hundreds of conversations, it produces something remarkable. Guests are asking more questions than they would with a human. Conversations flow naturally on WhatsApp. And occasionally, a guest pauses mid-conversation to ask if they’re talking to AI — then simply continues anyway.

If you want to understand how to build AI policies that actually protect and elevate your brand voice, this part of the conversation alone is worth the full listen. You can also explore how platforms like CraftedStays are thinking about AI and STR content for modern search — the parallels are closer than you might think.

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🎂 Hospitality Is a Feelings Business

One of the most memorable moments in this episode isn’t about AI at all — or rather, it’s about what AI makes possible for humans.

Every morning, Zzzing runs a prompt through their AI agents asking one simple question: Who is celebrating a birthday during their stay? The AI scans the passports submitted during the check-in process, identifies the guest, and surfaces the information. The team then makes the decision — a call, a small cake, a personal gesture.

Sabrina recalled a guest who was traveling solo with her kids and had mentioned Peppa Pig during a conversation. Three euros’ worth of Peppa Pig stickers appeared in the apartment. The reaction was gold.

“It’s not the most expensive bottle of champagne. It’s something that makes them say — they care. I’m special.”

That’s the through-line of everything Sabrina shares in this episode. AI did the heavy lifting. The people showed up. That, she says, is 21st-century hospitality.

It connects directly to the larger conversation around building repeat bookings through genuine guest relationships — not transactions, but emotional memory.

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🏷️ Sprinkling the Brand Throughout the Stay

One of the more tactical conversations in this episode centers on a problem most property managers quietly recognize but rarely address: guests remember the OTA, not the brand.

They spend 3 minutes on Airbnb to book the stay. They spend three days inside your property. And they go home knowing the destination, maybe even loving the experience — but not necessarily remembering your brand name.

Sabrina’s response to this isn’t a single tactic. It’s a philosophy: be intentional about how your brand shows up throughout the stay. The gift. The third-day check-in message. The little moments that are distinctly, recognizably yours.

Her goal is for guests to go home not just satisfied, but actively looking for Zzzing on their next trip — because the brand felt like it knew them.

This is exactly the kind of strategic brand thinking that direct booking growth relies on — turning an OTA booking into a long-term relationship.

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📈 AI, ADR, and Revenue Per Guest

Toward the end of the conversation, Sabrina opens up about something she’s actively working on: using AI to improve revenue per stay, not just communication.

Her thinking is that when the booking journey has been excellent and the guest walks into a property they’re delighted by, they have an appetite to spend. They want the holiday to be special. And that moment of engagement — when they’re emotionally invested in the experience — is the right moment to surface relevant upsells, local experiences, and premium add-ons.

For property managers in competitive markets where price wars are constant, and ADR feels like a ceiling, this is a meaningful shift in thinking. And it’s one that the episode only begins to unpack — another reason to listen through to the end.

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⚡ Rapid-Fire Questions with Sabrina

📚 Book Recommendation: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. Sabrina describes it as a book about ownership of ideas — that inspiration lands on you, and it becomes yours when you decide to take the leap. For anyone in hospitality, she highlights three big takeaways: authenticity, imagination, and the courage to act when an idea finds you.

🧠 Mindset Advice for Entrepreneurs: “Let curiosity lead.” Don’t be scared of what you don’t know — be curious about it. Especially in AI. Wonder, explore, go back to the drawing board. Curiosity, Sabrina says, is a superpower — and even more so now when technology can handle the operational noise and give you space to actually explore.

🎯 One Tactical Tip for Direct Bookings: Be the guest. Before your first real booking, go through your own booking process from start to finish. Find the hiccups before they do. Experience the communication. Ask yourself honestly — would you stay here? If the answer gives you pause, that’s your starting point. Every reservation, Sabrina says, is a live show. Your job is to direct it.

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🔗 Connect with Sabrina Mulligan

🔹 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sabrinamulligan

Sabrina is also getting ready to launch a series of private mastermind sessions for STR professionals who want to go deeper on AI and guest experience — focused on where AI truly fits in the high-touch space, and how to monetize the guest experience without losing the human element. Keep an eye on her LinkedIn for details.

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🎧 Ready to Hear the Full Story?

This episode goes places this blog can only point to. The real conversation — the Peppa Pig story, the wedding proposal Zoe handled, the moment a 70-year-old guest sent a voice note, and Zoe understood it perfectly — those are the details that make this one worth your full attention.

Listen to the full episode on Spotify and YouTube.

And if you’re thinking about your own direct booking journey — whether you’re just getting started or ready to build something that actually converts — visit CraftedStays.co to start your free trial. Your platform should work as hard as your hospitality does.

You can also explore more from the Booked Solid blog:

• How to Write AI Prompts for Short-Term Rentals
• Repeat Bookings Email Strategy
• Vacation Rental Marketing: The Complete Guide
• STR Brand Identity and Direct Bookings with Lisa Roads

Transcription

Sabrina: Ultimately, guests want and deserve answers instantly. They want to know, yeah, how the hot tub works, and they don’t want you to explain it ’cause of language barriers. They want you to send a video. Right? When we started realizing what the tricks of great communication are, because that’s what we learned how to communicate better, rather than writing policies for ai, we started realizing that when a guest then asks us in the middle of a conversation, Hey, are you AI or human?

Because you’re answering really quickly. And Zoe says, I am an AI agent. I support the guest experience team of Zinc, which works 24 7. I can rob them in whenever you want. The guest will just continue speaking to Zoe, asking for recommendations, what to do, and engaging on WhatsApp. So it’s quite beautiful to witness when conversations are orchestrated in this way.

Gil: Before we bring on my guest, I wanted to talk just a little bit about something that I’ve been hearing a lot from Host. I keep on hearing the same thing. I know my website isn’t converting, but I can’t afford $8,000 on a agency to rebuild it. Here’s the thing, you’re letting all these marketing strategies, you’re driving traffic and you’re putting it.

All to work, but if your site isn’t really built to convert, you’re basically lighting your energy and money on fire. And even if you could afford an agency build, every time you want to test something or make a change, you’re having to pay them again. You can’t iterate, you can’t test, and you really can’t improve on things.

You don’t need a custom $10,000 website to get the conversion rates that really matter. You just need the right platform. That’s why I build CraftedStays. It’s purpose built for short term rentals and designed from the ground up to help you drive more direct bookings. You can finally turn that traffic into bookings and you can keep on testing and improving.

As you learn, you can make changes all on the platform. You don’t need to learn something new. So if you need some help or you wanna get started, go ahead and go to CraftedStays co and start your free trial. Now let’s bring on our guests and dive deep into hospitality and marketing.

Gil : Hey folks. Welcome back to the Booked Solid Show, the show where we bring in top operators to discuss hospitality, operations and direct bookings. On today’s show, I have Sab Mulligan. She’s a property manager in Malta and Island in the Mediterranean. She operates over 550 keys, growing from just 50 just a few years back.

She’s a true operator that is leveraging AI not only to get more things done, but to deliver an experience today that she isn’t able to do previously. She talks about how she’s able to combine AI and the human touch together to really drive up one hospitality and two repeat booking. So without further ado, let’s bring her in.

 Gil: Hey Sab, welcome to the show.

 Sabrina: Hi. Thank you. Very excited to be here.

 Gil: I’m super excited to, to have you on. Uh, we got a little bit of a chance to get to know each other a bit more right before the show. And I can already tell it’s going to be an exciting one. So I can’t wait for you to share kind of how you have evolved the business, how you’re thinking about your investments, how you thought about some of the challenges that you went through when you’re growing the business.

So maybe to kick us off, can you give us an introduction on who you are and what you do?

 Sabrina: Okay. For sure. Okay, so, um, I’ve been in the STR space for the last three years. So my background is in hospitality. I’ve always loved hospitality. I’ve loved the, well, what attracted me to the space was the art of hosting, right? And so while I’m very keen on that and about giving personalized guest experiences, there’s also this side of me which has this hunger to, to grow the business as well, right?

Scale at the speed that we set for ourselves. This is what we tell the team. And at one point when we started, when I started with Zing three years ago, it felt like a choice. Can I host like I have one boutique property, or can I scale like I have no ceiling? And I think maybe we’ll also be able to talk about basically how tech was the solution and gave us the opportunity to really unlock and grow fast.

But that’s just a bit about zing and kind of what I love talking about the most. My background before hospitality was media and I also worked with, uh, tech Academy Ice Campus, which is in the Mediterranean. So I got the opportunity of really getting the tech bug and when I walked into hospitality. My mindset was, what can tech do for hospitality without losing its soul?

So as you can imagine, three years ago, I was very surprised to see that hospitality players, even the leading ones, and not just in SDR, even hotels, they’re not, they weren’t really not even talking about tech unless it’s like PMS and maybe the beginning conversations in the beginning about direct bookings.

But that’s all it was. So that’s my intro.

 Gil: Yeah. And you’ve, you’ve gone pretty deep in more recently, a lot of AI work as well too. Um. I want, I want you to share something that we were talking about right before the show of like, you just kind of alluded just now about like, you go small and grow organically or do you grow, like there’s no ceiling there, and how tech was able to enable you to scale at the growth and the ambitions that you had.

Talk to me about some of the use cases and how that is actually applied in your growth.

 Sabrina: Yeah, so we agree, right? Hospitality is people centric, guest focused. So it is humans need to run the show, but this does not mean that they also need to do the mediocre. They can’t, they don’t need to do the day to day. Right, and so this is where it all started with us when it comes to ai because what was very confusing for me is you’re either gonna employ a lot of people who will turn the guest experience team into a call center.

Why? Because they’re answering the same questions over and over again. Or you’re gonna employ hospitality talent, the ones who like crave to delight guests. They’re not gonna spend a lot of time working with your brand because they’re gonna get very bored doing the administrative stuff or answering the repeat questions.

Now, in our case, we wanted to continue to scale at a rapid pace, but also being in mota, being an island, people expect that people first human friendly. So we could only strike that balance with tech when we started our AI journey. Well that this was like about 11 months ago now. Well, it started off as first, let’s get our house in order, because we realized that we had a lot of information, which was scattered a lot of policies, which we started working on, but not necessarily complete.

And we realized that the fastest way for us to really get strong in AI was to set our policies and to be able to start structuring our policies. Whether it is property specific or umbrella policies and just diving right in very quickly, we started getting great results. Um, something I want to mention is, in our case, our ai, her name is Zoe, and so Humanization was very important one because we wanted the brand character.

We wanted to create, so I have this exercise, I used to do it with the team, like who is Zoe? What does she look like? What does she like? Um, mention your three favorite actresses basically, and. Which personality traits do you think she has? How is she gonna answer whether it is local expertise, her friendliness, her empathy.

We actually built a character. This was also important strategically because I had a lot of resistance in our team as well, right? AI is just gonna turn us into this cold brand. Ai, you’re gonna make lots of mistakes. Will ai, um, what’s the word, hallucinate, right?

 Gil: Yeah.

 Sabrina: So with how we introduced our Zoe to the team, we started scheduling her in in shifts where humans don’t like to be scheduled in.

We started, so giving her night shift, we started putting Zoe in maybe on a Sunday afternoon, and also we included them in, Hey, look, so we answered them correctly. That’s on us because our policy wasn’t written as it should be. Right, and getting them involved just led us to where we are today where Zoe answers about 80 to 85% of guest communication and owner communication as well, which is an even quicker win.

 Gil: So, so it’s, wait, wait a minute. You’re not just using Zoe to answer your guest and when your guest reaches out to you either, uh, on the platforms or another channels there, but you’re also using it to answer owners as well too.

 Sabrina: Yes. So

 Gil: how did that work?

 Sabrina: Okay, so two things here. So when it comes to guests, I was like very. I wanted a WhatsApp integration because I wanted to be able to answer guests fast. Now, what this meant though, that guests expect to receive a reply fast and humans can’t keep up with it, not when you have like 350 check-ins all coming in at three o’clock in the afternoon, right?

So again, this was one of the reasons that pushed me towards ai when we got more and more confident with guests, one of. My thoughts was now owners and all our owners are on property management agreements, right? So that is, we are a commission-based business, so owners would give us their property to manage it for them on their behalf.

Owners all ask the same questions, will you hit. Your monthly target, what is this maintenance bill for, basically? Um, do you think what, who is booking my property? So it was even quicker, a quicker win for us with owners because we had less policies to write. The wins were also tremendous because owners just like getting instant answers.

So

 Gil: And what are the types of questions that do they ask?

 Sabrina: owners.

 Gil: Yeah. Like what are, what, what’s, what are they asking? How, like what are, I guess, what are the answers that Zoe is filling in?

 Sabrina: Well, they could ask, obviously our owners have access to an owner’s dashboard, right? Full visibility, complete transparency. They’re seeing bookings coming in, calendar rates and everything, but still, they would ask, Hey, on my dashboard, I’m seeing a 100 euro invoice for maintenance. What was that for? So Zoe can of course be because of the technology, see what that service call was for which reservation it was, and give full details to the owner.

And this is the difference, right, between having a chat bot and having ai,

 Gil: Yeah.

 Sabrina: the

 Gil: That makes, that makes a,

 Sabrina: Yeah.

 Gil: a lot of sense. So like when the AI understands not just what’s happening around, but it knows the details. In the guest side, for instance, the booking details or on the homeowner side, all the details of the properties and any associated line items, the revenue, the invoices, the charges, all that stuff.

It’s able to then kind of piece those things together and actually probably a lot better, sometimes even than a human can. Um, because an AI agent can go through that stuff really, really quickly. It can, a lot of times, like when you’re employing a human, we’ll take shortcuts, like even ourselves, like we’ll take shortcuts because we wanna get back to.

That guest or that person right away. But when you’re using an AI agent, it’s very easy for them to check four different places and check the policy and have consistency in place. So in many ways, like training, an training an AI agent is often easier than even training a human.

 Sabrina: Yeah, in our case, remember like with Boom, it being an AI powered PMS, it brings all, IT is collecting the information from all different sources, so that is what makes it even more efficient. What you said, what I really liked is about training humans is one of the biggest advantages of AI with guests is that Zoe is answering in the language of the guest.

If a guest is sending a voice note, then Zoe can understand the voice note. And right back, basically no spelling mistakes, consistency, and you are managing potentially hundreds of questions at the same time, and it sounds the same, right? It sounds like the brand. It doesn’t sound like the individual. And I had some really good training sessions with people trying to convince them when to use emojis, when not to use emojis.

When to say Mr. When to say, Hey, Sam. So with AI, you’re building the policy and it’s gonna sound like your brand, and that gives you a lot of power and a lot of peace as well, because you know what to expect.

 Gil: Yeah, I, I think that, that what to expect is like the, the real key thing there. Like there’s this level of consistency that you get from an AI agent. You can always retrain it, you can give an information, you can redefine your policies and SOPs and says, oh, this is actually how we handle early chickens.

Or This is how we handle our pet policies, or a damage, and you know, that. Any time from then on, it’s going to be executed. And having managed teams in the past, there’s oftentimes where you may have to train someone over and over again or remind someone that like, okay, you made this mistake last time.

Let’s try not to do it again. But inevitably, months can pass by and that same mistake could happen again. Or you may need to train many, many people, not just one person. So like having that focus concentration and training an AI agent for some of these things. Is like extremely high leverage.

 Sabrina: Yeah. And the voice, right? The what do you want your voice to be, basically, and this is then the power of the brand. Again, when it comes to friendliness, empathy, suggesting places, making recommendations like you want her to, you want your AI to sound like your brand, and so you need to build policies which are not just related to the properties and as we said through whatever time, checkout time is or what about luggage?

But also about the sound of the AI and how you want the AI to react and how you want the AI to mirror the guest as well. So we have an example we like showing when an AI refers to her husband as hobby

 Gil: Mm-hmm.

 Sabrina: will say, Hey, it’s great that your hobby is thinking about going skiing, whereas water skiing when he’s in multi, right.

’cause he’s mirroring the conversation. Yeah.

 Gil: Yeah. Um, was there any, you mentioned some parts of it. I’m interested in hearing like some of your learnings along the way because my guess is that it wasn’t smooth sailing all the way through. That there was things that you had to like phase out or maybe even pull back or make adjustments on to make sure that it’s capturing the quality standard that you wanna have there.

 Sabrina: So the writing, I think the art of this is the art of writing policies, right? To not just knowing your business, but also writing the policies. So the way we, the way I write policies, it’s always with a trigger, always putting in feeling, right? So acknowledging what the guest might be feeling. And again, that’s, so when we started it was like put in the policy of checkout.

So in the beginning we were like, checkout is at 10 o’clock. No, you don’t want the AI to just say 10 o’clock. You want to say, Hey, we hope you loved your stay in Malta. Check out is at 10. You want us to see if you can extend this? That is the type of answer you would like a human to give. So this is how you need to write it for the ai.

And when we put our, more of our, the creative storytellers side on and started to make the ai, AI speak like it’s human. It started sounding better than humans because it was consistent and we started seeing patterns where guests are asking us more questions even though they know it’s ai. Actually, that’s, uh, I think one thing to mention is in the beginning everyone was, lab sub was saying like, sub, you have to say Zoe is AI first sentence.

Like, right. And so when I did that, you just get cold. It’s like, because a lot of people might. Would’ve had a few bad experiences. Maybe as soon as you say, hi, Zoe. I’m ai, the AI agent of Zing. Ooh, feels. You almost feel the tension in a conversation when I switched that off because, hey, ultimately guests.

Want and deserve answers instantly. They want to know how the hot tub works and they don’t want you to explain it ’cause of language barriers. They want you to send a video, right? When we started realizing what the tricks of great communication are, because that’s what we learned, how to communicate better rather than.

Writing policies for ai, we started realizing that when a guest then asks us in the middle of a conversation, Hey, are you AI or human? Because you’re answering really quickly. And Zoe says, I am an AI agent. I support the guest experience team of Zinc, which works 24 7. I can rob them in whenever you want.

The guest will just continue speaking to Zoe, asking for recommendations, what to do. And engaging on WhatsApp. So it’s quite beautiful to witness when conversations are orchestrated in this way.

 Gil: I like how you. Crafted that response there. I, I also wonder like your history in media production working in the national theaters, like there’s a sense of that, like understanding the roles and how people react to things that you’ve almost like, maybe it was a different world, a different lifetime of yours, but I’m starting to see like that also woven into kind of how you’re taking it.

 Sabrina: Oh yeah. One of my hobbies, I write children’s books. Right? And one of my, my third book, um, after COVID was about feelings, basically. Right. And I think there, in my research for that project, I learned a real lot about feelings. And this is what hospitality is all about, right? It’s a feelings business from the moment of before they book, right?

The excitement, the anticipation, they want to know about the country. I mean, they’re spending money, they’re choosing your country, they’re choosing you. And then a few days before. What are we gonna do when we are in Muta? They want to build memories, you know? Then the fear or anxiety because, ooh, this is a vacation rental.

What to expect? Was there a bad review? Did we make up? Did we make up our mind? Right? Did we make the right decision? Then they walk in and there’s delight. Oh, few relief, right? So hospitality is really. Business of feelings for me all the way till the end, right when they’re leaving and they’re like, oh, I wish this holiday wasn’t over.

Let’s plan our next trip.

 Gil: Yeah, that, that’s so powerful. Like No, you mentioned that like we, we, we’ve had many property managers and I’ve seen many property managers that do really well in direct bookings, and it’s when they’re able to really empathize with the guests and know why they’re visiting, what they’re going through, what challenges they have, what’s in their thinking process as they’re planning that, and try a trip.

Those are, I typically see as the ones that, one, they get the five stars, but more so they give you this feeling of, oh, this, this host really understood me. Uh, it doesn’t feel like a com, like your stay was a commodity. That you took lots of intention in making sure that their trip is, was, was special to them.

And I think subsequently because of that. Attention to detail. Those are typically the ones that deserve and earn those repeat bookings. Those are the ones that they get word of mouth. If someone said, oh, I went to this place, I had a really good time, and they’re recommending it to others. Um, so I can see kind of that translating from really making sure that the guest is taken care of.

Your vision of things. But also building that lasting relationship with the guests that encourages them to keep on coming back to you.

 Sabrina: Yeah. It’s not a transaction, eh? I remember again, when I started, especially with our guest experience team, it’s like, let’s understand who these guests are. Pick a random, random three. And you see a mother traveling with twins for the first time. No other adult, someone who has decided to, um, come for a retirement holiday, basically.

Right? And they’re here, right? One. We had someone who was coming to Malta after scoring like a really huge deal and they wanted to celebrate a Walter. When you understand the intent. This is why I’m very passionate about AI because especially when it comes to predictions, when the tech can deliver and can really do all the fact finding for you and you can just show up for the guest, that’s when hospitality starts feeling human again.

I mean, something we do now at Zing is every morning a prompt we give Bam. Um, one of our AI agents is who is celebrating their birthday during their stay? Now the AI agent will scan passports, which have been submitted as part of the check-in process, right? And say, okay, person, Susan is celebrating her 45th birthday.

AI did that. But then our team is gonna make the call or surprise with a little cake, right? And people is gonna, people remember that moment of connection. AI did the heavy lifting, the people showed up. That is 21st century hospitality to me.

 Gil: I think that that, that’s a really important point there, that we’re now in an era where. If you wanted to do these things, you can have done it with humans, but it doesn’t scale very well. Having someone scan through passports or scanning through messages and adding notes, it gets to a point where it’s unsustainable.

But now with this technology, computers are really good now at understanding intent and purpose and can reason better. And so you’re at a point now where you can deliver some of the experiences. And I love how you’re, you’re thinking about like. This allows a human to then take this forward and deliver this, but now you have the data to do so.

And I think, I really think that we’re entering this next era hospitality where you can start to do these things at scale. You don’t have a small portfolio. You have what, 500 doors or 500 keys there and you’re able five 50. You’re able to then roll this out across the board at so many different keys that you didn’t think a year back.

It was not possible to do a lot of these different things and deliver on this like higher level of hospitality. And I truly think that this is where things are going rather than this feeling of commodity. Um, the hosts that do really well that. Are really building on a great experience. Those are the ones that are going to thrive.

We saw this big wave recently where hosts and property managers are ultra monetizing their places, and they’re making their places really stand out. And I think that the next maturity point in the industry is the host that can put the right systems together to deliver an exceptional experience.

 Sabrina: Yeah, and when it comes to repeat guests, then how beautiful is that? Right? That AI is just going to remind me what the guest asks about, what the guest likes in their gift basket. Right. And again, the ability to surprise the ability to delight the guest, you’re kind of beating them to it, right? And that as well is very helpful when it comes to direct bookings

 Gil: is that where a, a lot of your energy is put towards now is really as you’re thinking about growing your direct bookings? It’s the repeat bookings and the exceptional hospitalities. That’s one of the biggest levers that you’re, you’re, you’re leveraging.

 Sabrina: And recommendations. Right? And, and guests referring and telling their friends, Hey, we went to the property, beautiful islands. But they kind of, it felt like they know us. Because this is what island and hospitality is about. I mean, there, one of the challenges is that people traveling to an island automatically want the friendly vibe, very relaxed by the sea.

So there’s that energy that they’re expecting. They don’t care how many properties you have and how many people you employ For them, they want to be one and not one of, they’re on holiday. If they want to know that you are there whenever they need you.

 Gil: Yeah,

 Sabrina: That’s the level of support.

 Gil: You mentioned something before, before our recording about sprinkling your brand. I, I want you to kind of double click on that and,

 Sabrina: Yeah. Okay.

 Gil: talk to us about, like, why, why is that important? Kind of overlaying on all the different things that we talked about here.

 Sabrina: Yeah, so I want to focus on this this year because of course it really hurts, right? Because people kind of tend to, and there is actually a survey about this. I don’t remember the source though. People remember the OTA channel, right? And they might spend what, a few minutes to book the property or make a bit more, but then they’re spending days in your property.

So you would expect or you would assume that they’re going back home knowing the name of the brand. That’s it. Then you would also assume more hope. Your desire would be that they would book directly with you. But the thing is they can’t, they don’t always remember your name. And so for me now being able to, because tech is doing a lot of the repetitive operational work and tasks and service calls for the team and all that, we can really focus on.

From the moment you arrive to when you step into the property to the little gift which is curated for you to the third day check how zing, in our case, how the brand name is kind of sprinkled during this stay with this cute or cheeky or this moment made me smile kind of feeling that will really get them more attracted to the brand.

So that next time they will look for our property again. So I think this is on us, right? We tend to say, oh, we’re paying lots of commissions to the OTA, but then now our job is that booking came in through the OCA channel. What am I doing to turn this client into a guest? And that is for me, the shift that we as a brand need to make.

And I think a lot of companies also need to focus on.

 Gil: Yeah, I, I like how you’re, you’re, you’re thinking about like the, the tactical they’re staying in your property and how you want to think through the entire guest experience and you want to make them remember that brand there, because I think you’re right. Airbnb has done a really good job at. Making a brand for themselves.

And you’re right that they’re only maybe there for whatever moment it takes for them to book the stay. Um, but they’re spending a lot more time with you. And it’s mainly because there’s a big, pretty big discrepancy in terms of what’s on their mind, how they think about brand. And brand takes a long time, many different touch points for you to really instill there.

And it’s a combination of maybe the things that you put in your property, maybe it’s. Them showing up in social media. Maybe you ask them to follow you and you come up in their feed and you inspire them throughout the year and they’re thinking about their next trip and they’ve seen all the different posts that you’ve provided and all the great things that they may have missed on.

Or maybe you’re collecting emails at, uh, addresses and you’re nurturing them month after month about all the local attractions, all the little sweet spots that they, they may have missed. And then encourage them in month 10, month nine to book again, like those are different ways to make sure that you’re growing that brand presence.

And I don’t know if you’ve heard the napkin trick for restaurants, but a restaurant, definitely a high-end restaurant finds that if you go to the restaurant three times, they have you for life, you will go there. And for high-end restaurants, they know the value of a repeat guest or a repeat, uh, customer.

So they ask you, is this the first time you’ve been here? Um, and you may say, no, this is our second time, or this is my first time, or whatever. And they’ll often put a red napkin on your table. Or drape it over your seat, and that’s signaling to all the other,

 Sabrina: Beautiful.

 Gil: uh, staff. That this is someone that we want to take care of.

This is someone that we want to convert into a repeat booking. And so you’ll notice that if you, if you ever go to a high-end restaurant and they employ this, the level of service that you get is exceptional. It’s not to say that you don’t get a good experience if you’re not, if you don’t have that napkin there or that you’ve been there for your first, fourth time, it’s that they wanna solidify in your mind that this is a place that you wanna come back to over and over again.

I think that that’s just so important to just remember there that it does take a lot of effort to make a really good first, second, and third impression, but if you do, you have that customer for life, they’re not gonna want to go anywhere else.

 Sabrina: Yeah, especially in a world that can be cold. And so as soon as you realize that there is this ability to build emotional connection, there is a lot of power there. I remember one of, about two years ago, one of our guests, she was traveling with her kids again, single mommy traveling with her kids, and at this point we were on this like oh gift baskets, and it felt very cookie cutter to me.

It’s like always the same gift basket she asked us. This mother. Are there any Peppa Pig? Peppa Pig is a cartoon. Not sure you guys. Yeah. All righty.

 Gil: still have young ones.

 Sabrina: okay, so are there any Peppa Pig activities in Malta kiosk? And we said no. And if it had to be just for humans, it would have ended there. But ai um, yeah, this was last year actually.

AI picked this. Right. And all we did was left maybe three euros worth of Pep Pig stickers in her apartment. Right? And it’s like we gave this woman gold. Her kids were happy. So of course, kids happy parent full. Right. And so it’s the little things. So it’s like when we say, what do you buy? Someone who has absolutely everything in the world, sometimes you can really touch a person’s heart with the smallest detail.

That’s all it takes. Not the most expensive bottle of champagne, but a something that really makes them kind of say, Hey, they care I’m special. You know? And that’s the art. I think that, that, that is the art of hospitality.

 Gil: yeah. It’s amazing how we’re transitioning into this world. It makes me almost look, also look forward to the types of stays that we get to experience. Like we think a lot about it on the host side, but also like looking forward to as like being a guest on the other side and having someone imagine the world many years from now, what it be like to be a guest ourselves, and the level of experience that could be more ubiquitous.

Like I would love it if more places were like this and has the technology to deliver upon these experiences. That would be pretty magical.

 Sabrina: I think tech, I think I know now we have experience in this tech can really give us the freedom and the flexibility and the time to be able to act like hosts Again, something that I’m really enjoying working on at the moment, of course, is in this a DR battle, right? Because a DR is big thing. I am working on how AI can focus on revenue.

Preoccupied room instead. Right. Because if the booking journey has been great, and if the guest is walking into the property and they like what they see, then they have an appetite to spend, then they want their holiday to be special. Right? And so then I have their attention. So that is where, especially for property managers who are on a constant battle because their area’s very competitive.

And a DR is a thing, there’s a price war. This is also a beautiful way of generating great revenue while making the experience for the guest even richer. So, uh, I think it’s gonna be exciting. It’s an exciting point for us this year to see how this is developing with ai.

 Gil: Yeah. I love it. I love it. So we usually end the show with. Three questions. I’m excited to ask you these. Uh, first question, what’s been a book that has heavily influenced your life?

 Sabrina: Okay. Big magic Elizabeth Gilbert. So,

 Gil: I haven’t read that one.

 Sabrina: okay. Uh, okay. Okay. So inspiration, right? Or an idea not necessarily owned by you. It’s a land on you, but then it might also land on me here in Malta. And one of us is gonna take it forward, basically. Right? So the idea becomes yours and you build it. This is one of my biggest lessons from Big Magic, basically when you decide to take it forward.

Okay? And so in Big Magic, it’s all about the, the, the, the ability to bit, to use imagination to create whatever, um, feels that can emotionally connect with another human. Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of, uh, what’s it called, very popular movie, where Julia Roberts was the main character. Eat, pray, love. Not sure if you wrong with that. She’s a fantastic, creative, beautiful author, and lots of lessons when it comes to authenticity. So many big lessons there for hospitality players, authenticity, imagination, and inspiration. Ownership of ideas. It is yours when you decide to take the leap.

 Gil: I love it. I love it. It’s a. Good book recommendation and also good, uh, good mindset advice as well too, which is, uh, well actually the second question that I have,

 Sabrina: Okay.

 Gil: have a lot of listeners here that are entrepreneurs. They’re doing things that they haven’t done before. They’re growing in immense amount of ways.

What’s one piece of mindset that advice that you would give to someone that’s starting something completely new?

 Sabrina: Let curiosity lead, curious. Be curious. I think this is what we should be teaching our children, but more importantly, we should not forget that we need to let curiosity drive us. And I think especially in my topic, which is very much become ai, be curious. Don’t be scared, be curious. You know, wonder and explore.

And you’ll discover, and you’ll go back to the drawing board, but be curious. Curiosity for me is a superpower.

 Gil: I love that, and I think that’s most more important now than ever because we have this almost superpower where we’re able to create things and do things that we haven’t done before. And in many ways. Many other humans haven’t been able to do it before as well too. And if you are able to be curious, play with things, see how things connect together, how you can put new puzzle pieces together, I think you’ll define some new innovations, new way of doing things, new way to scale your business.

So I think like I definitely think like. Yes, definitely. Curiosity was important before, but it’s more important now than ever.

 Sabrina: Yeah, especially if you get to a place where technology is. Helping you so that you don’t need to jump from tab to tab, spreadsheet to spreadsheet one, tech tool to another, and it’s giving you that organization and that seamlessness and that gives you like a breather and you can really have the space to be curious without thinking kind of, you know, I’m stealing time from what is really my business.

I think the driver of the business can be curiosity when the tech is working in the background, like it’s your growth engine.

 Gil: Yeah. Absolutely. Last

 Sabrina: Three. Oh oh, okay.

 Gil: Um, we talked a lot about ai. We talked about how you grew and some of the, some of the things that you worked through using technologies. We talked a lot about direct bookings and building your brand and how to put hospitality first. What’s one tactical advice? That our listeners can put into practice today to either get started in direct bookings or amplify their direct bookings.

 Sabrina: I would say act like you’re the guest, be your youngest. A lot of different things when it comes to the curation of the content, the look of your property, the booking experience. This is something I’m constantly repeating and kind of trying to empower the team, is how can you list a new property and not try and complete the booking process before our first guest does, right?

Be the guest. Go through the process and find the little hiccup before they do because you finding it is a big save. And not just for the brand, but also for the guest who might have a lot, he’s counting a lot on this holiday, right? So there’s that pressure. I think that this is just like a show. We talked about media in the very beginning, the show.

Curtains opening. Every reservation is like a live show, and we are there to direct it and to be the maestro of the orchestra basically. So yeah, I think be the guest experience, your guest experience, experience the booking experience. Just think like the guest, because we all know what we want to experience.

It’s like if you tell me, um. I have great properties and I would ask you, okay, would you book your own properties? Imagine you had to tell me, Uhuh, I would never stay in my own property. It’s like, so it’s not good for you, but it’s good for the guest. How does that work? You know? So be the guest that is.

 Gil: that’s, that’s, that’s so important. And you, and you, you mentioned of like the prevention of something that could go wrong, but also the, the. Ways to make it magical as well too. When you put yourself in the sh the, the guest shoes, um, or their own lens, you’re really trying to think about like, what are the different places that you can really make it feel magical.

You might not make it feel magical in every single instance, but if you have a couple touch points that feels extra special, that will definitely come true.

 Sabrina: That’s it. And a couple of touch points, one or two, you know, so if you really craft your guest experience and say, okay, these are my two key touch points. So it doesn’t take much. You just need to be strategic in the way you curate or design the experience you want to deliver with heart. Mm-hmm.

 Gil: I love that. I love that. So it was a huge pleasure having you on and share your story. I.

 Sabrina: thank you.

 Gil: I am very excited to have met you and to learn from you and think about all the different things that, like we hear a lot that people are using ai, um, and I think that our certain operators that are using AI very, very strategically and really being very methodical of not just doing more, going faster, but how do you use AI to build new experiences that you couldn’t have done?

Before, and I think that that’s what made this episode extra special for me is to get to, to see an operator in practice and how they think about leveraging AI in the new world.

 Sabrina: I really appreciate. Thank you very much, big fan of your work. I will keep following.

 Gil: Thank you. Till next time. Thanks, Sab.

 Sabrina: care. Bye.